I’ll come back, she vowed. Someday, when the Hurricane Wars were over and she owed nothing more to the bonds that it had formed. I promise.
Day bled into evening and then day again as Talasyn sailed northwest over the Eversea and made landfall in Sardovia. The wintry air was a shock to her system after Nenavar’s muggy tropical heat.
There was more activity in the Wildermarch than was usual for such an early hour. Shipwrights were running checks on the carracks and the large-caliber siege weapons were being oiled and restocked. The distant horizon behind a cluster of outlying buildings glowed a nebula of various colors, which meant that the Enchanters were inspecting the stormship hearts. The air swam with the rustle of feathers as messenger pigeons carried important missives to and fro.
“Tal!” Khaede strode up to her just as she was about to head into the building that housed the offices of the Sardovian War Council. “You’re alive!”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“It’s far too easy to get a rise out of you, you know,” Khaede remarked with a smirk. It was nice to see her playful, even if it was at Talasyn’s expense. “How was your little trip? See any dragons?”
“No.”
“See anyone, then?” Khaede pressed.
Talasyn lowered her gaze.
“What’s that expression? What’s wrong? It’s all right if you weren’t able to commune with the Light Sever. Honestly, it was a fool’s errand—I always thought that. What matters is that you made it back safely and now you can go on more fool’s errands—”
“It’s not that.” Talasyn stopped walking and Khaede followed suit. “I mean, I wasn’t able to commune with the Light Sever, but that’s only part of it.”
“Well, go on, tell me everything,” Khaede ordered. “But make it quick. The whole base is in an uproar. Not long after you left, we started getting reports of significant Kesathese movement, ironclads amassing on the border and all that. To top it off, Coxswain Darius has vanished; there’s no sign of him anywhere in this entire blasted canyon—”
Talasyn blanched as realization set in. “It’s him,” she blurted out, seeing in her mind’s eye the abject defeat on Darius’s weathered, bearded face. Remembering how his voice had cracked when he spoke of how they were all going to die. “He’s the traitor.”
She told Khaede the whole story as quickly as she could, barely pausing for breath between sentences, not particularly caring that she would have to repeat herself to the Amirante in a few minutes. She wanted her friend to be the first to know everything. At first, Khaede listened stone-faced, nodding in all the right places, but the more that was recounted to her, the further her jaw dropped, until she was outright gaping at Talasyn.
“You’re a princess?”
“Not so loud!” Talasyn hissed. She glanced around to check if anyone had overheard, but the few people that were also outside the officers’ building seemed to be too preoccupied with their own tasks to care about a conversation between two helmsmen. “We don’t know that for sure. And this is very sensitive information, don’t go around shouting it—”
“Well, can you blame me? That was a lot of unexpected news to get in such a short amount of time,” Khaede grumbled. She set off at a brisk pace, past the entryway and down the narrow brick corridors, Talasyn falling into step beside her. “Incidentally, I hope that Darius dies a slow and painful death. May Enlal’s griffins feast on his liver until the Unmaking.”
“I could tell something was wrong with him,” Talasyn muttered over the hollow ache in her chest. “Before I left.”
“Guess that makes you smarter than Vela.” Khaede rapped sharply on the door of the Amirante’s office, flinging it open without waiting for permission to enter. “Darius has defected—again—and Talasyn’s a princess,” she announced as she strode into the room.
“Khaede!” Talasyn scurried over the threshold as Vela blinked at her. “I told you, keep your voice down—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Your Majesty—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“I’m almost afraid to ask what’s going on but, unfortunately, I have to,” Vela interrupted. “Sit down, both of you. Talasyn, please explain.”
Vela listened to the entirety of Talasyn’s debrief with far more composure than Khaede had shown. She showed no reaction to Darius’s betrayal, which wasn’t to say that she took it in her stride; a mask slammed over the Amirante’s features, as inscrutable as any crafted from obsidian metal that the Shadowforged Legion would wear.
After Talasyn had finished speaking, the silence that hung over the office was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife. Summer silence, she thought, a little frantically. The tense, oppressive stillness of high noon, when everything went dormant in the stifling heat that baked the Great Steppe. Only, this time, she was in the canyon of the Wildermarch and it was early in the morning, faint beams of sunlight filtering in through the windows, falling on furniture and charts and Vela’s lone eye, which was staring at her as she fidgeted in her seat. Khaede had reverted to her usual bored, caustic self, slouching in her own chair and crossing her arms.
“I can’t even begin to guess how your and Alaric’s magic combined,” Vela finally said. “I’ll ask our Enchanters if they’ve ever heard of such a thing happening before. It might also be possible for you and me to replicate the effect, so we’ll work on that as well. What I do know, for certain, is that aetherspace holds all the dimensions—including time. Perhaps that’s why, as you got closer to the nexus point, you began remembering things a one-year-old would have forgotten.”
“Perhaps.” Talasyn was uneasy. It was all conjecture. What specific knowledge the Sardovians had amassed pertaining to the Lightweave over the centuries had been lost when Kesath invaded Sunstead.
“But Nenavar has to help us now, right?” said Khaede. “Elagbi, at least—his daughter grew up here and Tal’s fighting for us, so—”
“Unfortunately, the Dominion prince doesn’t make the decisions. That’s the Zahiya-lachis’s job.” Vela pursed her lips. “And, after all the havoc that Sardovia has wrought within her borders, I am not so certain that Urduja will be inclined to assist us. Even if we are harboring her granddaughter.”
“I would just like to state, for the record, that it was all Alaric Ossinast’s fault,” Talasyn said with as much dignity as she could manage.